Islam and Apostasy: In Interview with
ABC Radio

For Muslims, apostasy - the renunciation of one's religious faith -
is a sin punishable by death in many parts of the Islamic world. We
discuss apostasy with Ibn Warraq, critic of Islamic fundamentalism
and author of a recent book "Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out".

Program Transcript

Stephen Crittenden: The word “apostate” refers to someone who
renounces or abandons their faith, either to take up a new faith, or
return to an old one, or to become an atheist.

In the earliest days of Christianity, apostasy was regarded as an
unpardonable sin, and in many parts of the Islamic world, apostasy
is still a capital offence. Well, Islamic apostasy is the new book
by secularist Muslim author Ibn Warraq. It’s the subject of his new
book; you may remember when we interviewed Ibn Warraq a few weeks
after the September 11 terrorist attack. He’s the author of Why I am
Not a Muslim, one of the most forceful and least politically correct
presentations on Islam you’ll ever read – and the name Ibn Warraq is
a pseudonym for obvious reasons.

His new book is called Leaving Islam. It’s part history of dissent
and apostasy in Islam, and part collection of testimonials from
former Muslims from all around the world, some writing anonymously,
others willing to risk their lives by using their real names, and
all writing about what it was about the Islamic faith that made them
want to leave it.

They include Muhammad bin Abdullah, who writes an extraordinary
essay about how his movement away from Islam began with the
nightmare of Bangladesh in 1971.

CHANTING

Reader: I saw a well-equipped invading army indiscriminately
killing millions of civilians and raping 200,000 women. Eight
million uprooted people walked barefoot to take refuge in a
neighbouring country. The institution of Islamic leadership
supported the invading army actively, in capturing and killing
freedom fighters and non-Muslims, and raping women on a massive
scale. Each of 4,000 mosques became the ideological powerhouses of
the mass killers and mass rapists, and these killers and rapists –
these Islamists – were the same people of the same land as the
freedom fighters and raped women. That was the civilians of
Bangladesh and the killer army of Pakistan in 1971. All the Muslim
countries and communities of the world either stood idle, or
actively sided with the killers and rapists in the name of Islam.

The message was clear: something was very wrong – either with all
the Islamic leaders, or with Islam itself.

I faced the truth of the mess of the Koran and hadith. The Koran
does not contain a single humane teaching that was not here before
Islam. Mankind will not lose a single moral precept if Islam is not
there tomorrow. After consulting the Koran, the hadith, the
Prophet’s biography, and Islamic history for years, with a guarded,
open mind, I related the past to the present. People tried reforming
Islam; it never worked. Again and again, Islam was mortgaged in the
hands of killer leadership, while the rest of the Muslim world only
said “this is not real Islam”.

It is indeed dangerous to humankind that nothing can stop Islam from
breeding cruel killers time and time again. That is because many of
the Prophet’s deeds and Koranic instruction are always alive there
to act as fertile ground for breeding killers. Things happened in
Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan and
Bangladesh. The catastrophe of September 11th shook the whole world.
I expected conflicting decisions of Islamic leadership in favour and
against bin Laden, based on geographic region. And how true my
intuition was. Major Islamic leadership in North America and Europe
“Islamically” denounced the cruelty of killing thousands by bin
Laden. And the same leadership of the same Islam, in Pakistan,
England and Muslim majority countries, “Islamically” supported him
as a hero.

Once again, the dual character of Islam became clear. Islam has two
sets of teeth, like elephants. One is ivory, which makes it elegant
and majestic; the other set of teeth is hidden inside its jaws, and
is used to chew and crush. All those sweet peace talks of Islam
relate to the time and place of weak Islam in early years. But
whenever and wherever Muslims were and are strong, they have another
set of cruel laws and conduct. Tell me why the national flags of
many Muslim countries have swords on them – a sword is not for
shaving beards, it’s only for killing.

Stephen Crittenden: The searing words of Muslim apostate
Muhammad bin Abdullah, from Bangladesh, writing in a new book
Leaving Islam, edited by Ibn Warraq.

Now, I want to assure our listeners that we haven’t included that
extract in our program in order to be offensive to Muslims, rather
to give a sense of just how incendiary this new book is – it’s like
plutonium – and what it is that some of these dissident writers in
the Islamic world are risking their lives in order to say.

And that’s the point. In the West, if a Jesuit wrote a book
detailing the shameful behaviour of German or Croatian Christians
during the Second World War, there would be no death threats and no
fatwas, indeed the author would find himself running from television
interview to television interview.

Well, earlier this week I spoke to a very tired-sounding Ibn Warraq,
in America. And I asked him about what had motivated Leaving Islam.

Ibn Warraq: Well, I wanted to point out that there were a
large number of ex-Muslims, and I wanted to hold them up as examples
to ex-Muslims to come out of the closet. I want people from Islamic
countries to breathe a freer air because of the courage of the
particular apostates. I wanted to open up the debate on Islam – and
after all, freedom of conscience is a very basic human right which
is denied many people in Islamic countries.

Stephen Crittenden: Is it meant for a Muslim readership?

Ibn Warraq: It’s meant for everyone, to show people who are
dithering, those who are on the fence, those who are scared to speak
out. One mustn’t forget the climate of fear in which many Muslims,
even in the West – may I read you a letter that was sent to the
Observer in London at the time of the Rushdie affair? The writer
from Pakistan wrote anonymously, stated that “Salman Rushdie speaks
for me. Mine is a voice that has not yet found expression in
newspaper columns, it is the voice of those who are born Muslims but
wish to recant in adulthood, yet are not permitted to, on pain of
death. Someone who does not live in an Islamic society cannot
imagine the sanctions – both self-imposed and external – that
militate against expressing religious disbelief. ‘I don’t believe in
God’ is an impossible public utterance, even among family and
friends. So we hold our tongues, those of us who doubt”. And this
climate of fear continues even into the West. There was a remarkable
article in The Washington Times by Julia Duin on October 13th 2002,
where she talks of something like twenty thousand Muslims who
convert to Christianity, but who are absolutely terrified of
revealing this to friends and neighbours. And she gives examples of
those who do reveal it, but who are then faced with ostracism, death
threats, physical violence of various kinds. As far as I know,
no-one’s been killed in the United States for example for their
decision to leave Islam, but life is not particularly easy for them.

Stephen Crittenden: Well, it’s a book of testimonials, many
of them like the one you just read. But if the book lacks anything,
it seems to me it lacks the kind of demographic information – we
know that Islam often describes itself as the fastest-growing
religion in the world, but there’s not much information about how
much leakage there is. Is that because there is no such information,
is it because that information’s very hard to come by? What’s the
story there?

Ibn Warraq: Yes indeed, for obvious reasons. Those who do
leave Islam, those who become apostates, keep it quiet. And churches
who baptise ex-Muslims are very reluctant to release the figures,
they don’t want to create a sensation and so on. But we do have –
according to the figures in this article in The Washington Times,
you do have at least twenty thousand in the United States converting
to Christianity. And then you have some figures that I do quote:
people in Algeria, for example in the Qabili, converting to
Christianity. One particular church recorded fifty baptisms in one
year, which is quite remarkable in that it doesn’t sound a lot, but
in a country where you can have your throat cut just for wearing
lipstick, this open avowal of apostasy is quite remarkable.

Stephen Crittenden: You also talk about apostasy in West
Africa, in Nigeria, in India, and in Indonesia, where you quote the
work of an Australian academic – Dr Thomas Reuter, of Melbourne
University – who talks about (and I had no idea about this) mass
conversion to Hinduism on the Island of Java, tens of thousands
leaving Islam for Hinduism in Indonesia over the past twenty years.

Ibn Warraq: Yes, many of these Muslims who converted back to
Hinduism, of course, were originally Hindus. So they were sort of
going back, as it were, to their ancestral faith.

Stephen Crittenden: But it does seem like an enormous divide,
a cultural divide, to move from the absolute monotheism of Islam
back to a religion of many gods like Hinduism.

Ibn Warraq: Yes indeed, but I suspect that their Islam, while
they were nominally Muslim, must have been of a very syncretic sort
of kind.

Stephen Crittenden: There is this history in Islam, isn’t
there, of killing apostates?

Ibn Warraq: Yes indeed, but of course this varied throughout
the centuries. I think I tried to make clear in the first part of my
book – the early history of apostasy in Islam – that the situation
really varied from century to century, ruler to ruler, country to
country. And there were some remarkably tolerant rulers; others were
incredibly intolerant. I give the example of the works of al-Razi,
who was a great physician, well-known in the West as Raziz in
mediaeval Europe, or Razis in Geoffrey Chaucer’s work. He was a
deist, he was certainly very anti-Islamic, and yet he survived, he
was not assassinated, which is a witness to the fact that he must
have lived in a fairly tolerant culture and society. But
unfortunately, of course, that wasn’t true always. You had the
period of the Inquisition – the Muslim Inquisition, the Minha, under
al Mahdi, that’s the 8th century Christian era or Common Era, when
many people were executed. There was a great intolerance in general
of various kinds of Sufism, because Sufis were considered really
beyond the pale.

Stephen Crittenden: Gnostics, even. I can imagine many
practising Muslims who have no intention of leaving Islam, that they
might actually find it interesting to read this book, because it’s a
history of dissident Islam.

Ibn Warraq: Yes, I hope that it does somehow add to – it
might sound paradoxical – to the climate of tolerance, to show that
Islamic culture wasn’t always so monolithic and so on, that there
were periods when people spoke up and defended their rights to
question and to doubt. The poet Almari, or the poems of Omar Khayyam,
one hopes that believing Muslims will also accept these freethinkers
as part of their culture.

Stephen Crittenden: In the contemporary Islamic world, to
what extent is the death penalty against apostates actually
enforced, and where is it most enforced?

Ibn Warraq: The most intolerant country at the moment is
Iran, where people of the Baha’i faith are persecuted and accused of
apostasy because they don’t accept that prophet Mohammed was the
last of the prophets, they believe that their own Baha’u’llah was
their last prophet. Since they do not accept one of the main tenets
of Islam, they’re considered apostates, and some have been executed.
Sudan is another intolerant country where people have been executed
for apostasy; the most famous of course was Mahmoud Taha. Egypt on
the whole has been a bit more tolerant. There was a case in recent
years of Mr Saladin Mosen, who was accused of apostasy because he
wrote a book criticising Islam, saying that all the ills of Egypt
came from Islam. He nonetheless, he was not executed, he nonetheless
is still in prison for having insulted Islam.

Stephen Crittenden: There’s a very interesting inconsistency
right at the heart of Islam. One of the documents that you include
in your book is a Shi’ite pronouncement on apostasy published in a
Tehran newspaper in 1986, that actually deals with this
inconsistency head-on, and that is that the Koran says there is no
compulsion in religion.

Ibn Warraq: Yes, they tried to get round that by saying it
doesn’t apply to apostasy, but Muslims have always been inconsistent
on this issue. The right to change one’s religion has always
troubled Islamic countries, and when the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was being written, drafted and discussed in the 1940s,
Saudi Arabia objected to this very clause, this Article 18 of the
Universal Declaration about the right to change one’s religion, and
in subsequent UN declarations, many Islamic countries have been very
uncomfortable with this clause about changing one’s religion.
Although of course they’re totally inconsistent in that they are
very happy when somebody converts to Islam.

Stephen Crittenden: And when Muslims leave Islam, why do they
leave? A lot of the people who give testimonials in your book talk
about reading the Qur’an being the thing that led them to leave,
reading it seriously, or reading it differently. There’s somebody
who talks about reading Maxim Rodenson’s famous biography of the
Prophet Mohammed, but what are the reasons?

Ibn Warraq: There are all sorts of different reasons. I have
tried to compile a taxonomy of the reasons for leaving Islam, but as
you’ve just noted, one of the main reasons for many of them was that
they read the Koran for the first time in translation. Of course,
you must realise that the vast majority of Muslims are not
Arabic-speaking, and the Koran is written in rather difficult
classical Arabic. And it’s not even accessible to Muslims in Arabic
countries, in fact, because of the difficulty of this classical
language, and the colloquial language, the language of everyday
life, is different.

Stephen Crittenden: That’s very interesting, because in the
Christian West, when the bible began to be translated and to become
widely available in the vernacular, you got the Reformation, and you
got an enormous upsurge in interest in religion, and interest in
Christianity. You got more fervour, not less. It seems that the
opposite may be the case in Islam.

Ibn Warraq: Well, yes and no. I think one of the paradoxical
results of greater education – in fact, if you look at the
composition of the various Islamic fundamentalist groups in modern
times, you will see that the most tolerant Muslims are not the ones
who are educated, but the uneducated people in the countryside, the
rural poor, who don’t actually know precisely what is in the Koran,
since they cannot read the difficult Arabic. Islamic fundamentalism
is very much an urban phenomenon of people who are educated, or able
to read the Koran and take it very literally.

Ibn Warraq is the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and the editor of The Origins of the Koran, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, and What the Koran Really Says.